Genetically Engineered Fish and the Strangeness of American Salmon

The AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon is the first engineered animal to be approved for human consumption.

Photograph by MCT / Landov

Sometime in the next few years, an entirely new fish will appear on American plates. After several decades of biotech research and a final upstream push past the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month, the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, a genetically engineered species of fish, will go into commercial production. While modified plants like corn and soy abound in the American diet, this will mark the first time in history that an engineered animal has been approved for human consumption. The new fish’s genetic code is comprised of components from three fish: base DNA from an Atlantic salmon; a growth gene from a Pacific Chinook salmon; and a promoter, a kind of “on” switch for genes, from a knobby-headed eel-shaped creature called an ocean pout.

The salmon’s pathway to the market will involve a similarly complex formulation. The first phase of AquAdvantage production will take place in Canada, on Prince Edward Island. There, the all-female eggs will be rendered sterile through a pressure treatment. They will then be flown to Panama, where they’ll be hatched, raised to harvestable size, slaughtered, and imported into the U.S. as the familiar orange-hued fillets that Americans have come to prefer above all other types of fish. Though AquaBounty hopes that the costs of this circuitous route to market could be offset by the savings incurred from the fish’s rapid growth (the company claims that AquAdvantage reaches maturity in about half the time as unmodified fish), the company is hoping to eventually gain permission to farm the fish here at home. “In the longer run,” AquaBounty’s co-founder, Elliot Entis, wrote me in an e-mail, “the real payoff will be when inland recirculating facilities are built in the U.S.”

As strange as the process will be for bringing the AquAdvantage to our tables, it is only the latest phase in a three-hundred-year-long project that has progressively disfigured the relationship between American salmon and American consumers. When colonists first arrived on the East Coast of the United States, in the seventeenth century, wild Atlantic salmon were present in commercially exploitable numbers in every major river system from Connecticut to Maine. Among the first things that settlers did was build small-scale dams, primarily for mill power, so that they might have flour in addition to fish. Dam by dam, Americans in the following centuries walled off upstream spawning grounds, and fish numbers dwindled to the point where most runs of Atlantic salmon qualify for endangered-species status. Populations of the five species of Pacific salmon in California, Oregon, and Washington were similarly degraded, most notably in the Columbia River basin, where some sixty hydroelectric dams were built between 1932 and the early nineteen-seventies.

This is not to say that American waters today are wholly depleted of salmon. In 2015, the state of Alaska, a still mostly dam-free wonder, harvested two hundred and sixty-three million Chinooks, sockeyes, cohos, ketas, and pinks, which could theoretically have supplied every American man, woman, and child with the 2.307 pounds of salmon they eat each year. But the strange logic of American industrial foodways intervened. Seventy per cent of U.S.-caught wild salmon is exported abroad, mostly to Europe and Japan. Some of that exported fish comes back to us—because processing costs are lower overseas, a large portion of the U.S. wild-salmon catch is headed and gutted in Alaska, then frozen and shipped to China. There, the fish are thawed, filleted, stripped of the pin bones that run down the fillets’ centers, then refrozen and re-imported to the U.S. Even accounting for that reëntry, about two-thirds of the salmon consumed by Americans is farmed in other countries. Often, it comes from Chile, a place that has no native salmon of its own and where introduced coho and Atlantics frequently escape their farms to become invasive species.

Given all this, it’s no wonder that there is considerable confusion when consumers get down to the business of actually buying and eating salmon. A recent report by the nonprofit organization Oceana found that, in eighty-two salmon samples taken from restaurants and grocery stores, forty-three per cent were mislabelled. Sixty-nine per cent of the mislabelling that Oceana found was farmed Atlantic salmon being sold as wild-caught Pacific salmon—a much cheaper human-grown creature substituted in for what consumers perceive as the wild, real deal. But even wild Alaskan salmon are becoming something of a hybrid. A system of hatcheries installed throughout the southern part of the state in the latter half of the twentieth century now “supplements” Alaskan rivers with almost a third of the salmon smolts that migrate out to sea every year. Is a salmon that is hatched and raised to toddlerhood in a human-run facility still a “wild” fish? It’s a question the creators of the AquAdvantage like to raise when faced with resistance to their own salmon-supplementation project.

What, then, are we to make of the genetically engineered salmon, as it is introduced into this complicated and counterintuitive system? AquaBounty’s Elliot Entis believes that the fish could offer considerable environmental benefits. To begin with, unlike most of today’s farmed salmon, AquAdvantage’s fast growth rate means that it could be raised cost-effectively in land-based tanks that are normally too energy intensive to bring a competitive salmon to market. Unlike conventional salmon, which are typically raised in open-ocean net pens, a tank-grown AquAdvantage could neither escape into the wild nor pollute the marine environment with waste effluent. Entis is similarly optimistic about the animal’s potential to reduce its footprint on wild “forage fish”—the little fish that are caught and fed to bigger ones. Forage-fish fisheries now comprise nearly a third of the world’s marine catch; as much as four pounds of wild fish are needed to produce a single pound of salmon. In an e-mail, Entis said that “in a commercial setting,” AquAdvantage’s dependence on wild fish as feed could be “improved by up to 25% without stretching the envelope.” This would be a timely innovation: just this year, the catch of Peruvian anchoveta, the world’s largest forage-fish fishery, had to be reduced dramatically because of a particularly severe El Niño event.

Others are far more skeptical of AquaBounty’s advantages. Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Kroger’s, Red Lobster, and other chains, aware that their customers are touchy about genetic engineering, have preëmptively said that the fish will not be welcome in their establishments. “Who will stock this fish?” Martin Jaffa, a consultant to the global salmon industry, asked when we exchanged e-mails recently. “Most stores have said no. The FDA have said it’s safe, but consumers have a good choice already, so unless it is very cheap consumers are unlikely to take the risk.”

Many in the aquaculture world worry that the new salmon will give Americans further reason to view their industry with suspicion. For years, aquaculturists have been making the very salient point that farming land animals, like cows and sheep, is far more freshwater intensive, and carries a far greater carbon footprint, than farming fish. “We often find ourselves on the defensive,” Josh Goldman, a Massachusetts-based barramundi grower, told me. “Since many people don’t understand the relative advantages of modern finfish aquaculture, my fear is that AquAdvantage will become one more misguided reason for the public to remain wary of eating farmed fish.” In a sense, Goldman’s fears are already being borne out. In the period leading up to AquaBounty’s approval, the F.D.A. received more than two million comments—the most ever received by the agency about a single issue. Many commenters focussed on the need to label the fish as an engineered animal. The F.D.A. disagreed, concluding that “AquAdvantage Salmon is not materially different from food derived from other Atlantic salmon” and therefore that “no additional labeling” is needed. When AquAdvantage arrives on the market, consumers wishing to avoid genetically engineered food may have to steer clear of farmed salmon altogether.

This would be a shame. Modern aquaculture is an extremely young industry with huge potential. It has made mistakes—overusing antibiotics, overdepending on things like Peruvian anchoveta as feed, and taking a lax stance on controlling pollutants. But in the past two decades, the growing farmed-fish sector has made considerable strides toward sustainability, and aquaculture now has the potential to play a major role in feeding the anticipated 9.6 billion people due to inhabit the planet by 2050. The wild-fish industry is moving in a different direction. Since the nineteen-nineties, the global marine catch has been stuck at around eighty million metric tons; it’s unlikely that we can squeeze much more out of an already overtaxed ocean. In the future, wary consumers who consider wild the only “good” choice will likely be eating a lot less salmon and a lot more of the anchovies that are currently relegated to fish food.

Paul Greenberg is the author of “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,” and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. He is currently at work on a book and a PBS “Frontline” documentary about omega-3 fatty acids.